Yves here. Those who are winning the class war can’t or won’t imagine that the other half is hanging o by its fingernails, hence the “pox on more stimulus” talk. Any fiscal move that might prod the Fed into real tightening and hurt their sanctified asset values would be too much to bear.
By Claudia Sahm, Director of Macroeconomic Policy, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
The $1.9 trillion relief package is on track to pass in March but not without a struggle and with some important details still uncertain. The price tag is big, coming on the heels of the nearly $4 trillion Congress appropriated last year. That’s six times the fiscal relief in the first two years of the Great Recession. Even without the new package, the U.S. federal debt is more than GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a level not seen since World War II.
With the stakes so high, disagreement among economists, even those who normally agree with each other, is heated. The question is whether spending at this level is necessary for full recovery or will instead overheat the economy. It appears that the inflation hawks have lost this skirmish, but the war is only getting started.
In the ranks of the inflation hawks are many revered macroeconomists. Most vocal are Larry Summers, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and Olivier Blanchard, a former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. John Taylor, Greg Mankiw, and Bill Dudley have raised similar concerns. On the other side are Janet Yellen, current Secretary of the Treasury, Jay Powell, current Chair of the Federal Reserve, Paul Krugman, a past Nobel Prize winner, and Gita Gopinath, the current Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund, among others.
All the sound and fury have recently unsettled bond markets. Last week, 10-year Treasury rates briefly hit 1.5% and remain at their highest levels since the pandemic began. Market-based inflation expectations moved up sharply, though their break-evens reflect other factors besides expected inflation. Nevertheless, inflation hawks point to these market signs as evidence of the risk that more deficit spending would push up rates and increase the government’s costs of servicing the federal debt. The markets steadied soon thereafter but the path forward in financial markets is far from certain. Moreover, as is always the case with markets, it is impossible to pinpoint the cause of day-to-day movements.
A critical review of the claims in this debate is plainly necessary. This essay focuses on four main areas of debate: potential output, inflation expectations, targeting on need, and pent-up demand. In each case, the data, research, and prior experience strongly suggest that the risks of doing too little far outweigh the risks of doing too much. The hawks raise valid points, but given what we know now, overheating is unlikely.
The $1.9 trillion package is not too big, it’s our estimates of capacity that are too low.
The risk of overheating rests on the dubious assumption that the relief package will create more demand than can be met easily and will thus lead to uncontrollable inflation. Recent data do not support that gloomy scenario. With ten million fewer jobs than prior to the pandemic, the case is strong to do more to support demand and a rapid recovery in the labor market.
Making the same mistake that so many did in the policy debates of the Great Recession and its painfully slow recovery, the hawks are underestimating the economy’s capacity. They base their argument on elementary comparisons of potential output from the Congressional Budget Office and GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That approach is outdated and flawed.
So, what is potential output and why is it so prominent in this debate? It’s the level of GDP beyond which inflation would pick up: the point at which demand outstrips supply and prices in general begin to rise. Once inflation picks up the fear is then that it would quickly become uncontrollable.
Conceptually, the hawks’ focus on the difference between GDP and potential output—the so-called output gap—is sensible. But they breeze past the commanding fact that similar calculations during the Great Recession understated the shortfall in demand and led to policy responses that were far too small.
Let’s look at Blanchard’s arithmetic on potential output:
“In January 2020, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest since 1953; it can reasonably be taken as being close to the natural rate. Put another way, output was probably very close to potential. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated the potential real growth for the past few years at around 1.7 percent. Given that actual real GDP in 2020 Q4 was 2.5 percent below its level a year earlier, this CBO estimate implies an output gap in 2020 Q4 of 1.7% + 2.5% = 4.2%, or, in nominal terms, about $900 billion.”
His math checks out, but his assurance does not. For years after the Great Recession, estimates of potential output have been revised downward again and again. See Figure 1. For example, in its forecast published in 2010, CBO expected potential output in 2020 to be $4 trillion (in nominal dollars) higher than its estimate it published in 2020. Using CBO’s earlier forecast and the BEA’s current estimate of GDP, the output gap would be $2½ trillion. That’s more than the relief package and nearly three timesBlanchard’s estimate.
The radically different views about the shortfall in output is no simple coding error. They do not reflect a rethinking of CBO’s methods over time. The dramatic differences are the direct result of years of economic distress after the Great Recession and a policy response that was profoundly lacking. It is widely understood now that the output gap was much larger in 2009 than we thought. Summers, who was then the Director of the National Economic Council, could not have known how dramatically the estimates of potential output would revise down. He could not have known how tragically small the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would prove to be. But he and the other inflation hawks should know better now. How many times do they have to put the economic well-being of American families at risk? Yes, the time could be different. The relief package could be more than the bare minimum. But that thinking was disastrous in the past recession and is a risk too large to take again.
Figure 1
It is unlikely that the U.S. economy could quickly reach the levels expected in 2010. But this exercise illustrates how a timid policy response in the face of the Great Recession led to immense damage in our productive capacity. It is likely that the economy could return to its pre-Covid operation, and with ten million jobs fewer than before the crisis—a larger shortfall than any time in the Great Recession—substantial unused capacity remains.
There are other problems with focusing on current estimates of aggregate GDP. First, the headline number masks a dramatic shift in the components during the Covid crisis. Specifically, services spending, which was half of GDP in January 2021 remains $650 billion lower at an annual rate. Goods spending, in sharp contrast, is $500 higher, and the bulk of that increase comes from outlays on durables. It is striking that the rise occurred rapidly and did not result in uncontrollable goods prices inflation. The second problem is that GDP has become increasing unequal across households. In the new package, contrary to some widely publicized claims, cash relief is targeted to most families, not the wealthiest. Finally, it is important to remember that GDP is subject to revisions, which can be substantial. The BEA release states, “The GDP estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency.” During the last recession, the downward revisions in GDP were large. Initially, the BEA estimated that GDP declined about only ¼ percent during the four quarters of 2008. The current estimate for 2008, after years of revisions, is a decline of 2¾ percent. It is unwise and at odds with past experiences to assume that the first read on GDP in 2020 fully captures the depths of the Covid crisis. Using current estimates of GDP to judge the output gap could lead us to do too little, as we did in the Great Recession.
We know from the Great Recession that revisions to actual and potential GDP can dramatically change estimates of the output gap. When the Obama Administration took office in 2009, the GDP gap was estimated to be -3%. Within a few years, as discussed in (Sahm, 2015), the estimate of the gap widened to -5%. It’s clear now that the that relief in 2009 should have been much larger. Fiscal restraint cost the American people dearly, and we must not repeat the mistake.
I am not the first to question the standard approach to output gaps. Fontanari, Palumbo, and Salvatori (2019) discuss the construction of CBO-style estimates—developed by Arthur Okun over 50 years ago (1962). They propose an alternate approach that does not depend on unobservables like the natural rate of unemployment and show that it produces better, more stable estimates of economic capacity. They argue that the massive drop in demand in the Great Recession did not lower long-run growth prospects as the CBO revisions suggest. Rather, because of the ways output is usually assessed in mainstream theory, the fall in incomes created enormous gaps relative to true potential output. They argue that the policy should have been much more aggressive in the Great Recession. Likewise, substantial relief is needed now.
Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Ulate (2018) provide three other estimates of potential output in 2016—a time when the Federal Reserve justified the first increase in interest rates since the Great Recession on the belief that we were nearing full employment and risking overheating. Fed officials now view that step as premature. Other estimates, including Blanchard and Quah (1989), Galí (1999), and Cochrane (1994), all show markedly larger gaps and less cyclicality than those based on CBO’s approach.
Coibion et al. examine a full range of dynamic properties in potential output estimates and conclude that CBO’s framework understated how much the economy could grow in 2016 without overheating. Their analysis predates the Covid crisis by three years, but their work highlights potential problems in recent CBO estimates. To be clear, their findings do not prove that CBO’s current output gaps are too small now or then. But their research underscores the uncertainty around such estimates. Taken together, these problems suggest that it is a mistake for inflation hawks to rely so heavily on them.
Inflation expectations among families are unlikely to move up and put pressure on inflation higher.
During the past few decades, actual inflation and expected inflation among families have been low and stable. Many economists credit monetary policy for stable, low inflation and creating the expectations of a similar path going forward. See Figure 2. The stability is referred to as “anchored expectations.”
Figure 2
Inflation hawks worry that the celebrated trade-off between unemployment and inflation, which weakened substantially over the years, as noted in Blanchard, Cerutti, and Summers (2015), could return with trillions of dollars in fiscal spending. They warn of “regime change” in which uncontrollable inflation comes roaring back. They argue that expecting higher inflation will untether expectations, leading to a self-fulling prophecy of more inflation: Workers would demand higher wages, employers would have to raise prices, causing more inflation. If the Federal Reserve were to wait, as Chair Powell (2020), has promised, to raise interest rates only after a period of sustained inflation, expectations might come unmoored. That would force the Fed to raise rates rapidly and risk a downturn.
But the data on expectations do not support such strong causal links. As Jason Sockin and I show, consumers for decades have paid little attention to news about inflation. Likewise, Detmeister, Jorento, Massaro, and Peneva (2015) demonstrated that inflation expectations among consumers do not respond to Fed announcements of more accommodative policy. Contrary to warnings of the hawks, the risk of “unanchored” inflation, after years of stable expectations, is low. In contrast, market-based measures of expected inflation have been volatile lately, but their expectations are more sensitive to policy announcements than consumers. Moreover, markets have considerable policy news to digest with the Fed’s new monetary policy framework and with massive fiscal relief from Congress. Consumers tend to tie their expectations to the inflation they personally experience, so bumps and wiggles in financial markets are unlikely to move consumer expectations and set off a price spiral.
Inflation experts at the Federal Reserve Board, such as Rudd (2020), show convincingly that underlying inflation remains low and persistent. Nor is it likely to step up quickly. As Federal Reserve officials have said repeatedly, they expect pent-up demand to push inflation higher temporarily after the economy reopens. In such a scenario, the Federal Reserve would not raise interest rates to cool the economy. In fact, after a decade of low inflation, Fed Chair Jay Powell sees some more inflation as welcome, allowing the Fed to meet its 2% inflation objective. He views doing “too little” fiscal relief as a larger risk than “too much.” The Federal Reserve—an institution known for its long history of inflation fears—sees little prospect of overheating. Put bluntly, the inflation hawks are out of touch with reality, again.
Inflation phobias are hard to quell, especially among economists who lived through the era of high inflation and high unemployment—referred to as “stagflation.” Malmendier, Nagel and Yan (2021) show that personal experience with high inflation helps explain the behavior of inflation hawks on the Federal Open Market Committee since the 1950s. Many inflation hawks outside the Fed share that same background.
Ironically, recent research suggests that we may have taken the wrong lessons from stagflation. Using geographically detailed data, Hazell, Herreño, Nakamura, and Steinsson (2020) find that changes in unemployment since the early 1980s had essentially no effect on inflation dynamics. Moreover, the world has changed over time and disinflationary pressures appear to have increased. Stock and Watson (2020) argues that globalization is one factor holding down inflation. It is possible that inflation could pick up as the federal debt climbs higher this year. But it is more likely that personal experiences decades ago and a misplaced faith in the unemployment-inflation tradeoff are leading the inflation hawks astray.
The selective memory of the inflation hawks is frustrating. They remember stagflation clearly like it was yesterday, but they forget the Federal Reserve’s decades of experience since then at keeping inflation under control. As Powell has said repeatedly, they are ready to act if the economy starts to overheat. No one wants to see uncontrollable inflation take root. The Fed knows how to fight inflation. The inflation hawks need a whole series of bad events for their doomsday scenario to come true. Each of these events is less likely than the next. In contrast, it is easy to see the scarring scenario come to pass. Doing less, as the hawks argue, would push that likelihood dangerously high.
$1.9 trillion should be large because the need is large.
A weak, if now very common, critique of the relief package is that it is “beyond the imperative of relief,” in Summers’ words. Inflationist hawks point to how aggregate employee compensation is back on track.
But narrowly focusing on aggregates is the wrong way to judge the current situation among families. The need remains widespread and urgent. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, half of U.S. families lost employment income last year and less than one fifth received jobless benefits. Millions are behind on paying their rent, mortgage, and student loans. Food banks remain under stress. The breadth of suffering and the gaping holes in our safety necessitate broad relief. Yellen argues, “I want to make sure that Americans don’t suffer needlessly…I think we know what those needs are, and we need to act forcefully.” Over half of the money would go directly to families, including stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, education, housing assistance, and child benefits. See Figure 3. The indirect effects, from ending the pandemic to helping small businesses, will benefit families and workers too.
Figure 3
The current stage of the economic crisis differs from the situation last spring when the CARES Act passed. Our economy was in free fall then. Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve moved quickly to pump trillions of dollars into the economy. It worked. Over the summer we clawed back half of the 20 million jobs lost in the spring. Yet, 10 million jobs are still missing–a loss larger than that in the depths of the Great Recession. And yet aggregate employee compensation has recovered. How can that be?
The answer has to do with the massive income inequality in the United States. Aggregate personal income—the largest component of which is employee compensation—is dizzyingly skewed toward the highest income families. In 2018, the most recent available data, the bottom 60% of households by income have less aggregate income than the top 10%. And the top 10% has markedly more income than the next 10%. Keep in mind that the famous $1,400 checks go the bottom 80% of households and the extra unemployment benefits are even more skewed to lower income families See Figure 4. It is important to remember that many Americans—not just those with low incomes—live paycheck to paycheck with little if any savings (Weidner, Kaplan, Violante, 2014). The need is always there, especially now.
Figure 4
A tepid policy response now risks locking in even more inequality. Inequality worsened during the Great Recession and its slow recovery. In 2018 the top 10% by personal income had $2.5 trillion more in personal income than in 2007. That is two and half times more than the aid to families in the new relief package. The $1.9 trillion package fights today’s crisis and the threat of even more damage.
A big relief package is necessary for a rapid recovery for all.
Without a big new relief package the labor market recovery could take until early 2023, a full three years after the Covid crisis began. With the relief package of the size the President is proposing, recovery should come much sooner. The inflation hawks are wrong. They are denying the obvious solution: more federal spending. After the CARES Act, spending and savings among families and the unemployed picked up rapidly, but as relief ran out, progress stalled. Consumer spending in January suggested that the $600 checks enacted in the December package once again spurred demand. But inflation hawks are not correct to argue that families are so flush with cash that additional checks will do nothing to stimulate spending. Experience in the Covid crisis and prior recessions shows undeniably that relief works. We are far from the finish line now and relief will get us there faster. Congress must do more. The risk of scarring looms larger than of overheating.
Yes, Americans entered the Covid crisis in a better place financially than before the Great Recession. Household debt levels are far more manageable in 2020 than in 2007. The financial system was better capitalized and more closely monitored than before the global financial crisis. The shock that pushed us into recession was different too: a global deadly pandemic, not a bursting housing price bubble. It is reasonable to expect the direct effects of Covid will dissipate faster than those of real estate prices in the Great Recession. However, a year into the current crisis the job losses reman massive. Moreover, we know from the 2001 recession, led by a tech bubble in the stock market and preceded by 4% unemployment, that even a mild recession can hold back the labor market for years. In fact, the unemployment rate had not returned to its pre-2001-recession level when the Great Recession began.
Since 2001, jobless recoveries where the labor market lags GDP have been the norm in the United States. Another would be devastating. The real unemployment rate—adjusted to include the millions who have dropped out of the labor force in the pandemic—is close to 10 percent, which is 6 percentage points above its pre-recession level. See Figure 5. The rapid improvements we saw early in the recovery slowed in the fall, even before the recent surge in Covid cases and deaths. To close the current shortfall in payrolls, we would need to add one million jobs, on average, every month for the rest of the year. More relief could help us achieve that ambitious goal. Wringing our hands over the low inflation risk will not.
Figure 5
We do not already have “all the ingredients for a booming economy,” and more relief will not “light a fire” leading to uncontrollable inflation. Let’s face facts: millions of Americans are suffering, the cleavage between the haves and the have nots is widening, and relief works. We need a robust recovery. The economy does not have the tailwinds to heal itself. Finally, for the inflation hawks to be right we would need to see wages as well as prices pick up substantially. With mass unemployment now that’s nearly impossible this year. Moreover, wages grew slowly well into the prior expansions. They are unlikely to take off even when most people are back to work.
Conclusion: Complacency, not inflation, is enemy number one. Congress must do more.
Now is the time for action. Now is not the time for inflation fears. The need is to do more is immense, and policymakers must deploy every tool they have. It is appropriate to consider the risks of overheating and the risks of suffering. It is not appropriate to downplay the suffering. The evidence and the research clearly show that the risks of doing too little are ones on which we should base policy. The hawks are peddling outdated thinking. When the world changes, we must change, especially when our decisions and advice could affect millions of people. It’s time to listen to Americans and help them back on their feet quickly. It’s time to build an economy that works for everyone.
The inflation hawks are wrong. Congress must go big.
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There is a very simple way that even an economist could understand, on “overheating”.
How much income was lost? A quick google has an estimate at $1.3 trillion, so far. That is less than the package, but only a very small part of the package actually goes directly to people.
Hence, the “stimulus” doesn’t even return the income to the pre-CV levels. Unless we thus agree that the pre-CV levels were overheating (a lot, since we just said that stimulus won’t bring it even to the pre-CV levels), then what overheating are we talking about?
There might be a temporary spike as capacity is brought back online (and possibly a more permament one if capacity was destroyed), but that’s a supply, not demand problem. Or have they finally decided to save the planet by limiting the supply?
This is a purely ideological nonsense – at best. At worst, it’s evil malignancy.
‘This is a purely ideological nonsense – at best. At worst, it’s evil malignancy.’
I do think its a mix of both. To some extent they all believe much of this nonsense, and on the other end really do not care about the poor, the homeless, the evicted, or even the now faltering low and middle middle class. Only the donors, the upper class, and *maybe* the upper middle class matters to either party.
i find it shocking that anyone listens to “inflation hawks”(or “deficit hawks”), at all any more.
how often do you have to be wrong before people ignore you?
similarly with the human as racoon ideology that continues to infect, not just the rabid right, but “moderate” democrats.
““While we have a lot of people who are unemployed who need help, we also in New Hampshire have a lot of businesses who can’t find employees who are concerned that people can make more money now on unemployment,” Shaheen told HuffPost on Tuesday.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/moderate-democrats-covid-relief-checks-unemployment-manchin_n_603e8d95c5b617a7e4112f30
that person is in a position to know better, dammit.
and i note the lack of concern for handing out trillions of dollars to giant corps and the uberwealthy who hide in them…where’s the “moral hazard”, there?
trickle down is, and has always been, an utter failure…unless you’re already riding high, of course…no need for bootstraps, then, eh?
sheesh.
let manchin and shaheen and most of the gop live in a trailer park on foodstamps(if they can “qualify”) for 6 months.
then we can talk.
the assumption that helping one’s fellow citizens will induce laziness and cause the economy to implode is ludicrous.
the economy already imploded for most people i know…well before covid.
As I am fond of retorting to the inflation chicken-hawks, for whom no empirical evidence appears capable of penetrating their tiny, adamantine skulls through to their equally tiny brains: “if the sky is always falling, how is it that it never hits the ground?”
I am staring at a 40% + year over year price increase for raw material.
Inflation or Wall Street “speculating in the foodstuffs of the population”?
With clogged ports, America can’t unload Chinese crapola fast enough, although Amazon can whip their employees harder to try and get them to move even faster, they are at the limit. Any faster and they will die at their whipping post.
Everybody in Washington is a Little Eichmann, venal to the core and proud of it.
oh, there’s inflation…way down here, for us…
but something is broken…supply and demand have become decoupled, somehow.(looks under desk like Lil George)
I’m thinking specifically back to last spring(?), when, due to pandemic border closings, etc, all the meat for export was piled to the ceiling in giant freezer warehouses, and the wsj, et alia were all worried about what would become of cargill.
i watched closely the next several supply runs for meat prices…and it all went up.
so…a surfeit of unexportable meat sitting in enormous freezer houses, sucking down electricity…and rather than send it to the grocers, and us’n’s…what? dog food?(also on the rise)…sure didn’t end up in many of the freezer cases i wandered by, which were all but empty for months.
Mysterium Tremendum, and all…us little people aren’t given to understand the workings of the Great Machine.
Ummmm… isn’t this “While we have a lot of people who are unemployed who need help, we also in New Hampshire have a lot of businesses who can’t find employees who are concerned that people can make more money now on unemployment,…” a f123456 contradiction? Don’t they read their own pablum any more and check for inconsistencies?
We also have a 61% which is the lowest in decades partly because a lot of businesses are closed, or refuse to raise their wages, and their is pandemic or so I heard somewhere.
As to that missing meat… just before the Great Financial Crisis Morgan Stanley was making a buck by storing raw materials like iron in giant warehouses and then moving them around once in while from city to city, and IIRC Canada and the United States. This meant that their weirdo financial products would give them money. Ten years ago I couldn’t give you better details, but yes moving coal, iron, wheat, and whatever else from warehouse to warehouse was profitable.
Yves:
I have been writing on student loan debt for a long time and also backing Alan Collinge at the Student Loan Justice Organization who is reaching 1 million signatures on the organization’s petition demanding the cancellation of student loan debt. The stance by many critics Including Biden has been well we did it and you should be able to do so yourself. Some such as Senator Debbie Stabenow have remarked that perhaps those in debt, defaulting, etc. will learn “fiscal responsibility.” The next time she is in public and I have a chance to ask (as she has probably forgotten this silver haired gentleman’s face) will be “what type of “fiscal responsibility” did you have in mind?.
I digress a bit in my aside commentary to this excellent article on a stimulus to which I agree with and also see a need to move the stimulus along rapidly in spite of Republican resistance to stymie its progress. One other sure way of stimulating the economy is to relieve many of the students holding loan debt allowing the them to be spend more in the economy (including houses) rather than debt, debt maintenance much of which the latter is penalties, interest on those penalties and the interest on the interest on the penalties. The latter should not be paid as it is the result of the cancellation of bankruptcy over the years (much of which was the work of Biden since the seventies).
Labor Participation Rate Rate is still low (61.4%) and the economy should be able to absorb additional college educated people and those with a partial education.
The cancellation would release many of the younger citizens to creating an economic life and stimulate the economy as a result rather than debt maintenance. As to the naysayers of such actions being a detriment to the economy, one study had this to say:
that debt…and all the rest…will be cancelled one way or the other.
(HT Mr Hudson)
people will just stop paying it at some point, and the entire edifice of FIRE will collapse into a heap….because the “smartest kids in the room” thought it would be cool to tie all that fiction together and force reality to rely on it.
Fight Club finale by other means.
similarly, i foresee a time when millions of people count bad credit scores as read, and set up tents and tar paper shacks in corporate campuses(bad credit= no rental unit for you), and forego car insurance(bad credit=too much $$), and generally start just taking what they want/need.
some non-skimpy version of a new new deal is all that can prevent that eventuality.
of course, the Masters would rather hire extra security and put up vaporising laser fences and kill us all than do anything like that.
again, Hubris…meet Nemesis.
the Masters are really kind of simple minded.
The master would say:
If the economy is so bad why is the stock market so crazy high?
Why do Democrats even exist? They’re basically Republicans who try to be more inclusive to minorities and LGBTQ persons. Their difference from Republicans on economics and foreign policy are so minimal, and as some say around here they are essentially republican-lite. May as well just vote for the actual thing, if only for accelerationism and/or the teeth gnashing of the MSM… Probably the second one.
Biden’s actions to help those “hanging on by their fingernails”
“On his website, Biden promises to “create a roadmap to citizenship for the nearly 11 million people who have been living in and strengthening our country for years.” In the final presidential debate, Biden unequivocally endorsed this position in person, telling debate moderator Kristen Welker and the millions of Americans watching at home that he would give every alien in the United States a pathway to citizenship within the first 100 days of his presidency.”
https://joebiden.com/immigration/
You can bet that Biden’s action will encourage tens of millions more “migrants” to come to the U.S., or to dump their children on this side of the border.
Wait until those eleven million hit the job market and get to compete with the ten million or so Americans who have lost their jobs in the pandemic.
The Americans need to be very careful elsewhere to ensure they can afford their military budget,
There is nothing like wasting money on futile wars, that they incapable of bringing to any successful conclusion.
This is where the Americans like to waste their money.
Can we get a new leader of the free world and fast?
This lot are as mad as a box of frogs.
Looking on the bright side.
They make UK policymakers look good and that isn’t easy.
First of all, Larry Summers has an uninterrupted record of being wrong on everything.
Maybe that’s all we need to know….
So has Larry Kudlow. I’ve been reading his articles for something twenty years. Maybe more and he is wrong every single time. Again, over a period of at least two decades. However he is a “conservative” economist while Larry Summers is a “liberal” economist or at least they play as one. The Larrys or Tweedledee and Tweedledum who are ostensibly on different parts of the political and economic spectrum and yet their advice, such as it is, is both similar and wrong.
Admittedly Mrs Summer’s boy is not completely bonkers while playing the wise, elder economist, which Kudlow is. While also playing the wise, elder economist. This is rather like the parties. Both wrong. One clueless and conservative and the other bonkers.
So besides extraordinarily stretched stock market valuations, what’s different this time? Inflation risk is low, the output gap is high, and the recent fluctuations in interest rates on 10-year Treasury debt securities are not extraordinary. In fact, other than during the covid pandemic, 10-year Treasury rates have been higher throughout the entire post-GFC period than they are today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10
Is the political opposition because federal fiscal policy is being implemented that will provide short-term financial relief to a significant number of Americans who have been deeply damaged by the pandemic and calculated actions of a few who now enjoy disproportionate political influence as a result of their engineered wealth and favorable campaign finance law?… or is it all about the stock market?
Well..
Republicans say that: “We cannot create prosperity by spending but only by saving and investing?”
They don’t understand that if demand is low there is little reason for business people to create more capacity.
There’s gotta be a better way to nip inflation, should it ever actually occur, (as opposed to the irrational fear that it is around every corner) rather than using austerity. Back in the Regan adm. Paul Craig Roberts claims he was the architect of supply side economics and it was designed to avoid austerity – because the economy needed jobs and wages to get out of what had settled into inflation. Nobody really understood it back then, but reading PCR describe his intentions he certainly seems to have been a photo-MMTer. Of course it didn’t work because all the sleaze ball international corporations offshored their companies to Asia and arbitraged labor. Labor here was decimated. And the rest is history. Inflation seems to be almost a cover story for that greedy play – “Oh we don’t want to cause inflation here in the US so we’ll just offshore all the jobs and make lots more money while we are at it.” The fear of inflation is based on unrealistic expectations of how an economy should operate and grow. And it seems that if there is even a hint that prices will go up then that’s clearly the beginning of a death spiral for us all… which is nonsense. The thing I really fail to understand is why don’t we use actual price controls? On a regular basis.
that’s proto MMTer. spell checker again
It’s fun to read an article such as this. If anything shows that ecoomics is NOT a science, then the line in the opening, “… disagreement among economists, …” is just one more indication of how unscientific it is. Can you imagine a couple of physicists arguning about whether or not the moon is circling the earth or not?
Then there are the phrases such as “natural unemployment rate.” Just exactly how is the rate “natural?” Who has determined and how was the value of this “natural rate” determined. It is set in an arbitrary manner by the Fed as input to their policy making.
I think that economists should establish a “pay for performance” scale whereby they get the US minimum wage rate unless they show that they can actually predict something correctly. Politicians should be prevented from uttering anything about fiscal, monetary, or employment policy whithout agreeing to show their reasoning and agreeing to pay back their salaries when events prove them wrong.
We waste too much time arguing economics and too much money paying inflated salaries to graduates of universities that grant Ph.Ds for work in economics. Put them in monasteries and let them argue about their poorly defined ideas.